To People Who Want to Get Started With Internet Marketing But Don’t Know Where or How to Begin

My nom de guerre is Peter Boston. I am a retired attorney.

About 10 years ago I started a website in a very obscure niche, although at the time nobody used the word niche or even knew what it meant.

I started the website because I had a deep interest in the subject matter and felt that I had something unique to contribute.

Over the years that little website has made me six figures and it continues to earn as consistently as a corporate position. What I didn’t know until a year or so ago was that I was making money by accident – or blind, dumb luck – however you want to put it.

The awakening came when I tried to duplicate my success outside of my little niche.

I started to register what I thought were keyword rich domain names. I put up websites, joined a few affiliate programs and sat back and waited for the money to roll in.

There were a few money making flurries now and then but nothing I could call a success. Not a consistent success, anyway.

Because I had hit a triple in my first at bat, and continued to hit well in my home ballpark, I figured that what I needed to do was to spend more time practicing on the road. So I worked harder. I bought more, what I thought were, keyword rich domain names. I put up more web sites. I joined more affiliate programs.

At one point I owned about 40 domain names, and had about 35 active web sites, most of which I couldn’t even remember the domain names for. Aside from the core group that I updated regularly and paid attention to I pretty much neglected all the other web sites. The cruncher came when I realized that I did not renew the domain names on a handful of neglected sites that were actually making some money. I finally caught on that if I was going to make this a business, then something had to change.

I was as conversant as anybody in Internet marketing so lack of knowledge was not an issue. It was clear that the mountain was not coming to me so I went to the mountain. I determined that I would take all the data about internet marketing that was floating around in my head and reduce it to the core essential of what you absolutely need to do to make money with a website.

Google built a billion-dollar business and dominates the internet by providing people with the information they need, and nothing more. To this day the Google homepage is mostly white space. There is a lesson to be learned there.

I did my homework. Google is generous with information about their business model. Google succeeds when webmasters succeed by delivering relevant, useful information to their customers.

It’s that simple. Deliver relevant, highly focused information to people looking for that precise information, and you will succeed.

I have learned how to research a niche. I have software that can identify the keyword phrases that get 1,000 or more searchers per month on Google, have high commercial value, and little competition. There are opportunities in even the most competitive niches when you know how to look. I know how to quickly research the top 10 or so web sites for that niche and come up with a list of keyword phrases and theme words that Google says are the most important keyword phrases and theme words for that niche.

On Page SEO is my strong suit but I learned that writing a few good pages that get indexed in Google and make it to the top 5 or 6 positions is not enough. Unless you start pointing links with the right anchor text to those pages they start slipping from the high rankings. Off the front page, the second page…Fortunately I have recently learned some easy to implement techniques for pointing the exact anchor text I need to the pages I want to rank for.

When that super valuable information is combined with an SEO friendly platform like Wordpress, which Google loves for reasons I can explain later, even a total newbie has a reasonably good chance of getting to the first or second page of Google for commercially important keyword phrases. That is about as good a start as you can get in Internet marketing.